Jessa Crispin: ‘Feminism has become a way of shielding your choices from questioning.’
Photograph: Chuck Kuan

I admit I picked up Why I Am Not a Feminist, a new polemic by the US writer Jessa Crispin, thinking she was some sort of female men’s rights activist and the book was arguing for a winding back of women’s rights.

I was wrong.

This is a gutsy and bracing book arguing that contemporary feminism has lost its way, and no longer has much in common with its revolutionary roots.

For an age, Crispin writes, gains for women were made by a “small number of radical, heavily invested women who did the hard work of dragging women’s position forward, usually through shocking acts and words”, and that the “majority of women benefited from the work of these few, while often quickly trying to disassociate themselves from them”.

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Last year, after closing her popular, long-running literary blog Bookslut, Crispin gave an interview to Vulture in whichshe said: “Contemporary feminism is not only embarrassing but incredibly misguided to the point where I can’t associate myself with it.”

The type of feminism Crispin is critiquing can loosely be described as lifestyle feminism: a “decade-long conversation about which television show is a good television show and which television show is a bad show”. But it’s also a movement that empowers individuals, often at the expense of the collective. The result is a blend of capitalism and feminism that feeds successful women into a patriarchal power structure of money, comfort and privilege but does not do much to improve the lives of many women who still live with capitalism’s boot on their neck.

Crispin writes that in feminism’s pursuit of mainstream acceptability, it’s lost a lot of its power and kick: “For something to be universally accepted, it must become as banal, as non-threatening and ineffective as possible.”

The book invokes the radical spirit of feminism’s second wave – a generation of feminists widely disowned by the younger generation. In Australia we saw a version of this matricide this play out with Helen Garner’s book, The First Stone, in the 1990s. (Garner is mentioned in Why I’m Not a Feminist’s acknowledgements.) More recently, Australia’s most famous feminist, Germaine Greer, has raised the ire of contemporary feminists with comments relating to trans people and identities.

“To understand how on-the-surface contemporary feminism really is,” Crispin writes, “we only need note that the most common markers of feminism’s success are the same markers of success in patriarchal capitalism.”

Crispin’s polemic is timely. If the election of Donald Trump indicates a failure of a feminist project to completely and thoroughly cut through to the mainstream (all those women in the so-called flyover states who voted for a “pussy-grabbing” president) – and the hugely successful Women’s March points to the movement’s green shoots – Crispin’s book has arrived at a time when there is an appetite for radicalism.

This is an edited version of a conversation Crispin had with Guardian Australia this week in the lead-up to her Australian tour.

Where did the idea for the book come from? Did it come out of a moment of rage with contemporary feminism or was it more gradual?

It wasn’t any one incident, it was more of a growing frustration. For the past five to 10 years I’ve just been one of those book critics – if a publication has a feminist book they want reviewed – they send me to do it. So I was reading a lot of feminist literature and it was getting more and more shallow, so there was a building dissatisfaction.

How did you come to feminism? Was it through 90s feminists such as Naomi Wolf or did you connect via the second wave, such as Dworkin?

My political awakening came through feminism. I come from a very conservative town and family and I was coming of age in the third wave but I didn’t have access to it. There were maybe eight books in the town library and they were Stephen King books. Then in my 20s I took a job at Planned Parenthood, part of which was working in the library. In my reading, I really moved back and forth between the decades and waves – everything from biology textbooks to riot grrrl zines. It was a more scattered education than other people. Shulamith Firestone was one of the first feminist writers I felt really connected to, and Susan Faludi. A lot of queer theory was helpful to me too.

So what was your real-life experience of feminism when you were growing up in middle America?

Second-wave feminism did not happen in my hometown and the third wave was happening in some places – but not in Kansas. That is a problem that people have with contemporary feminism. They think we solved the problems tackled by the second wave.

How do you define the lifestyle feminism that you critique in the book – and why is it bad?

The primary problem I have with it is that is focused primarily on the individual – it’s your way of dealing with your own life. There’s very little sense of solidarity. You use feminism to ask for a raise at work, or negotiate your romantic relationships – but you don’t use it to negotiate the shared experience that minorities have or to renegotiate capitalism. There is less of an understanding of the big picture and more instead of how you are doing as an individual. It’s a very inward movement – and very individualistic.

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Like the way that women talk about self-care?

Self-care has definitely changed in its meaning. Now it means society is not going to take care of you – so you have to take care of yourself – so “go ahead and get that blowout, girl”. For the most part, self-care is arranged around products and consumer experiences that are organised around poorly paid, immigrant labour – particularly in cities like New York.

You write that feminism is a “decade-long conversation about which television show is a good television show and which television show is a bad show”. What do you mean by that? That it’s become something abstract?

We’re very focused on pop culture right now – and issues of representation, but not structural issues. With the rise of first-person essays online, it’s an easy thing to write, “There’s a rape in this movie, and that’s bad,” and you get paid well for it. You don’t have to go any further, it doesn’t have to get uncomfortable.

As long as feminism is about a lifestyle choice, you don’t have to change or question or your behaviour. Feminist writers have been saying for years now, “You don’t have to change your life to be a feminists” – we don’t have to stop listening to music by misogynistic musicians, or removing all the hair from our bodies, or that we can drop out of work and raise children in the suburbs and we don’t have to question it.

Feminism has become a way of shielding your choices from questioning. This is part of choice feminism; I call myself a feminist and I’m making a choice so therefore the choice is feminist. And that’s absurd. There is a sense that if you question this, it is shaming. All of this is deflecting criticism. A woman had a go at me today because she’s married and she got very angry because I write that marriage is a patriarchal institution. Of course it’s patriarchal. What does she think it is?

A lot of your book is a critique of capitalism – which very much distinguishes it from the Lean In style of feminism, which says to move with and harness those forces. Do you think capitalism has gobbled up feminism?

It’s happened to every movement. Part of the problem is it’s just the consumerist society that we live in – this is true with the gay rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. Corporations and soda companies use these political viewpoints to sell products – and feminism was the first movement to fall to that, particularly as women have more and more money. Feminism has become more of a slogan and a marketing campaign.

In this particular era it’s very fashionable to be a radical without doing any of the work – call yourself a feminist, an anarchist, an anti-capitalist. The market will always be trying to sell something back to yourself. Resist it. Be a moving target.

‘There’s a lot of women who are frustrated and angry and who have taken to the streets.’ Photograph: Jose Luis Magana/AP

After Trump, people want people to tell them where to direct that energy but there’s not a sense of where the movement is going to go. Everyone is hungry for something new. With the women’s marches – there’s a lot of women who are frustrated and angry and who have taken to the streets but there’s not a coherent message behind it all.

How do you see society functioning once or if the patriarchy is destroyed?

I don’t think that there’s necessarily any one answer. For a long time I read about 19th-century American experimental communities – of people trying different ways of structuring a community where there’s no ownership of properties or a spouse, instead there’s free love. My only concern is, how do I start this place?

But people have different needs and different temperaments, it’s not so easy for everyone to live this way. My idea is small radical communities.

The way we live is quite individualistic though – there’s not a huge emphasis on community.

There’s an enormous need to have less atomised communities. Look at corporations in Silicon Valley – which, if you work there, have become the source of everything. They do your laundry, they drive you to work, look after your housing and your social life – it’s your whole existence – and that’s really dangerous. They cut you off.

So far these ideas of how to live differently have only been thought about in these very capitalistic and corporate ways. I am really interested in how we structure our communities.

New York is a very hard place to live without relying on exploited labour. You need someone to wash your clothes and cook your food because you are living in these tiny pods.

Do celebrity feminists do more harm than good?

I don’t look to George Clooney to tell me how to think about the presidential election. It’s completely irrelevant and divorced from the reality. That was a huge problem with the Clinton campaign; it wasn’t engaged with people’s lives. She doesn’t understand how people experience their lives right now.

You write in the book about how romance needs to be demoted from being the central feature of women’s lives.

Men in our society still bestow value and we still look to them to tell us whether or not we are valuable. Men tell us they are in charge of everything still. They tell us where our place is – and this has an influence on where our lives go. We like to think this is a choice – it’s love or romance. We don’t like to think of the unconscious aspect there. But look at what we are taught – that what redeems us is love. Love is the highest level of meaning that we can achieve.

Is conventional beauty still something feminists hold on to?

There’s a definite focus on sexiness and beauty. The idea that we could reject notions of beauty – contemporary feminists don’t want to talk about that.

There are some pop stars, like Grimes, who have made statements saying, “I don’t shave my armpits.” But we still look at ugliness as some sort of character flaw. There’s been fat pride movement over the years and it’s always framed in the language of “fat is beautiful”. Why don’t we just get rid of this word “beautiful”? Why do people have to be beautiful?